Fire & Blood Files: So What’s The Deal With That OTHER ‘Game Of Thrones’ Spinoff?

In the minutes before the second season finale of House of the Dragon aired on HBO, a sizzle reel played of HBO shows slated to appear later in 2024 and into 2025. Amongst them was roughly six seconds of footage from the next Game of Thrones spinoff series, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.

Scheduled to debut next year (before we get another season of House of the Dragon), A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms adapts a different George R.R. Martin story than either Fire and Blood or the original A Song of Ice and Fire novels. It also takes place in an entirely different time than either House of the Dragon or Game of Thrones. While six seconds isn’t a lot, this is the internet, and House of the Dragon is over for now. So let’s pore over that footage and start talking about the next story set in the world of Westeros! 

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is based on three novellas written by Martin featuring the hedge knight Duncan and his diminutive squire, Egg (hence their common sobriquet of “the Dunk and Egg stories”). Purportedly, the plan is to adapt one novella per season, with the first season tackling the first story, “The Hedge Knight” across six episode.

In Westeros, a hedge knight is essentially a free agent knight, so called because they aren’t “landed” (ie owns no property) or in service to a specific house, and therefore travel from town to town looking for work, often sleeping under hedges. Not surprising for the class-based feudal society of Westeros, hedge knights are thus often looked down upon as untrustworthy or unworthy relative to “regular” knights (in the novel A Feast For Crows, Brienne of Tarth thinks, “A hedge knight and a robber knight are two sides of the same sword.”

Dunk (Peter Claffey) unsurprisingly gets the most screen time in the HBO sneak peak footage. Taking its inspiration from “The Hedge Knight”, the first season of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms will presumably follow Dunk as he becomes a hedge knight, enters a tournament as a sort of job interview and source of income, and ends up meeting the enigmatic Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell).

Claffey only delivers one line in this teaser (declaring his name to be “Duncan the Tall”, the sobriquet history will remember him by) but even in the few short scenes a quick impression of Dunk as earnest and well-meaning is formed. This is in keeping with the character’s presentation in the books, and at least in these fleeting images, Claffey seems to be embodying the character well. 

The other notable character in the story and the teaser is Egg. Egg is an eccentric young boy who crosses paths with Dunk early in the story, and ultimately ends up serving as his squire during the events of the tournament which drive the action of “The Hedge Knight.” To say much more about Egg is to quickly cross into spoiler territory; suffice to say, there’s an in-story reason why he’s bald. 

While not apparent from the content of the teaser, it’s worth pointing out when in the history of Westeros A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms takes place. Set a little less than 100 years before the start of Game of Thrones, it therefore falls between that series and House of the Dragon. Notably, the events of all three novellas from which A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is drawing occur in the shadow of the Blackfyre Rebellion, the other major Targaryen Civil War aside from HotD‘s Dance of the Dragons.

The actual war is over and peace restored — and the war itself is triggered and conducted by very different events than the Dance of the Dragons — but it casts a large shadow over the events of the stories. In this way, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has an opportunity to exist at least somewhat in conversation with House of the Dragon, dealing with the aftermath and impact of a major civil conflict of the kind contemporaneously unfolding on its sister series (HotD is already tacitly creating those connections; one of the figures in Daemon’s final vision is the Bloodraven, an ancestor from the era of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms who plays a minor but key role in the stories).

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms also promises to further HotD‘s second season focus on the impact of the game of thrones on the smallfolk of Westeros. All three of the Dunk and Egg stories take place far away from the halls of power in King’s Landing, and while the title characters don’t entirely manage to avoid entanglement in the twisted webs of the Targaryens and other high lords of Westeros, Dunk’s unique perspective afforded by his lower-class background and mindset is a throughline from which the stories never waiver. 

While the wait for the third season of House of the Dragon seems long, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms will provide a faster return to the world of Westeros. It’s difficult to pass judgment on a scant few seconds of footage (and important not to), but the brief glimpses afforded by this sneak peek are promising. With any luck, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms will prove a worthy and entertaining expansion of the Game of Thrones TV universe, just as the novellas do for the Song of Ice and Fire literary saga.